Baby Loss Awareness Week

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Dinenage]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point. He is absolutely right that we need to give that area a lot more attention. Having that ability to spend time together will be an incredibly valuable and important part of the process of grieving and coming to terms with the unbelievably tragic death of a baby.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

On the question of raising awareness, a job that was so ably started by my hon. Friends, the Minister will be aware of my Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration etc) Act 2019, which became law in May, two parts of which relate to stillbirth. One gives the Secretary of State the power to have coroners investigate stillbirths and the other sets up a review by the Secretary of State to look into the registration of pre-24-week stillbirths. That review body has not met for over a year, so can the Minister update us on when the legislation will be laid so that, for the first time, coroners will have the power and ability to investigate stillbirths where they see fit to do so?

[Caroline Dinenage]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that matter, because he brought forward a really important private Member’s Bill. The consultation concluded on 18 June after receiving over 350 responses. Officials are currently analysing all those responses and will report as soon as possible.

Much has been achieved since 2015 to improve the quality of bereavement care for parents, and I put on record the efforts of the all-party parliamentary group on baby loss, ably led by my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury with support from Members on both sides of the House. I will speak more about developments in bereavement care in a moment, but first I would like to talk about some of the progress made by the NHS on improving safety and reducing baby loss in maternity and neonatal services.

I cannot continue any further without putting on record my enormous thanks and gratitude to my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Mr Hunt), who has done more than anybody to further the cause of patient safety and to investigate the untimely deaths of babies, and across the NHS. I thank him from all of us for his incredible work in that space.

Members will be aware of the Government’s ambition to halve the rates of stillbirths and neonatal deaths by 2025, with an interim ambition to achieve a 20% reduction in those rates by 2020. The ambition includes similar reductions in maternal mortality and serious brain injuries in babies during or soon after birth, and a 25% reduction in the pre-term birth rate from the current 8% to 6% by 2025.

This ambition was set in November 2015, when the Lancet stillbirth series ranked the UK 33rd out of 35 high-income countries for stillbirths. Case reviews of stillbirths and neonatal deaths suggest that many such deaths might have been prevented by better clinical care, and the Morecambe Bay investigation report made 44 recommendations for improving the safety of maternity services.

In 2016-17, the Department of Health launched a range of initiatives that are being delivered by the NHS under the auspices of the maternity transformation programme, and I would like to mention a few of those achievements. Every NHS trust with maternity services now has a board that includes obstetric and midwifery safety champions to lead the development of an organisational safety culture. Every trust has received a share of the £8.1 million maternity safety training fund, and 30,945 training places for multidisciplinary teams were delivered in 2018-19, with courses focusing on training for childbirth emergencies in labour wards and in the community, as well as on leadership, communication and resilience.

Evaluation of the “Saving Babies’ Lives” care bundle found that clinical improvements such as better monitoring of a baby’s growth and movement in pregnancy, as well as better monitoring in labour, mean that maternity staff have helped to save more than 160 babies’ lives across 19 maternity units. An estimated 600 stillbirths could be prevented annually if all maternity units adopted national best practice. A revised version of the care bundle is currently being rolled out across England, and it includes elements to reduce the number of pre-term births and to optimise care where pre-term delivery cannot be prevented.